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Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Analysis of Lexemes for ‘Rain’ in Biblical Hebrew

Summary

The paper asks whether six Biblical Hebrew nouns for rain are really synonyms. The nouns are gešem, zerem, yôreh, māṭār, malqôš and rĕbîbîm. Building on Coseriu's structural semantics and Cruse's theory of sense relations, the author first sorts every occurrence into "functional languages." These are chronologically and stylistically uniform layers of the text, following Ida Zatelli's scheme. Within each layer she records the syntagmatic behaviour of each lexeme: which verbs it is subject or object of, its construct-chain partners, its adjectives, its coordinations and its parallelisms. She then compares the lexemes paradigmatically, using hyponymy, co-hyponymy and Cruse's Ways-of-Seeing. The resulting hierarchy is clear:

  • gešem is the generic superordinate. It is neutral until context fixes its value.
  • māṭār is defined by its telic role: rain that serves the agricultural cycle.
  • yôreh and malqôš split rain by season (autumn and spring).
  • rĕbîbîm and zerem split rain by intensity.

The study shows that near-synonym sets can be broken into separate semantic dimensions using distributional evidence from a closed corpus.

Key points

  • The corpus covers six lexemes. The general term gešem alone has 35 attestations, spread across ABH, EBH 1–4 and LBH 1–3.
  • The functional languages follow Zatelli (2004). Examples include EBH 1 historical-narrative, EBH 2 poetic, EBH 3 Hosea, EBH 4 juridical-cultic and LBH 3 Job.
  • Word meaning is described with Cruse's Ways-of-Seeing (part/whole, kind, functional, life-cycle), which recast Pustejovsky's qualia roles.
  • Whether māṭār is good or bad depends on timing:
    • In its season it means fertility and harvest.
    • Out of season it is coordinated with hail (Ex 9) or thunder (1 Sam 12).
  • rĕbîbîm occurs only in the plural and denotes light, fertilising rain. zerem is a violent downpour from which people seek shelter (Is 4,6; 32,2). zerem is the only lexeme in the set with a negative value.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Before comparing near-synonyms, split the corpus into uniform register and period layers, so that differences in meaning are not confused with differences in genre or date. — For Mova (world): When compiling verb classes or WordNet-style sense distinctions, tag evidence by genre (fables, school texts, news), so that a sense found only in one register is not treated as general.
  • I2. Profile each word by its syntactic slots: what it is subject of, object of, its genitive partners, its modifiers and its coordinations. This gives an explainable fingerprint of meaning rather than a bag of words. — For Mova (tree): Collect dependency-relation profiles per lemma from parsed UD trees as an interpretable feature for sense discrimination and for flagging lemmas whose attachment patterns look suspicious.
  • I3. Organise a group of near-synonyms by orthogonal dimensions (purpose, season, intensity) under one neutral superordinate, rather than as a flat synonym list. — For Mova (world): The ontology could store near-synonym clusters as a hypernym plus named contrast dimensions, letting the world model infer attributes like intensity or timing from the chosen word.
  • I4. A word's positive or negative value may be absent from the lexicon and come instead from context: here māṭār turns harmful when it falls out of season. — For Mova (frames): Polarity or affect for event nouns could be computed from frame context (timing, co-occurring harmful entities) rather than fixed per lemma, which also supports irony and implicature detection.
  • I5. Coordination and parallelism are used as evidence of semantic kinship. For example, rain listed alongside hail, fire and brimstone signals a destructive reading. — For Mova (frames): Coordinated conjuncts in a UD tree can pass semantic-class and polarity hints to one another, helping assign roles or sentiment to rare nouns.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-16581

@inproceedings{pratesi2024syntagmatic,
  title = {{Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Analysis of Lexemes for ‘Rain’ in Biblical Hebrew}},
  author = {Pratesi, Chiara Stornaiuolo},
  booktitle = {Quaderni di Linguistica e Studi Orientali 10},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-16581},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-16581}
}

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